User:Joseph Xu Zhou

I am Joseph X. Zhou, a researcher of biophysics in the department of Biological Physics of Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany. I am interested in the molecule dynamics of proteins and protein-protein interactions networks, the regulation and signal network of the cell, and signal amplification in the cell during the mitosis.

My current research involves finding the relationship between protein dynamics and drug resistance of the HIV protease. Instead of using a traditional measure of “genetic distance”, a dynamics-based measure is used to build a phylogenic tree of HIV-1 protease. The relationship between the mutation and the drug-resistance can be revealed by the analysis of the tree. Traditional dynamic analysis for biomolecules is complicated and time-consuming. My colleagues and I are trying to employ a smarter method to investigate the changes of the protein dynamics due to the sequence mutations of HIV protease. Our results so far show that the mutations have obvious effects on the movements of the “flaps” of the HIV protease. The relationship between the change in dynamics and the drug resistance can be clarified from our further analysis of the genetic homology.